Page 28 of Hold On to Me
Anton appeared at her door on a Tuesday evening.
She hadn’t been expecting him. She hadn’t been expecting anyone, it was nine o’clock and she was in pyjamas and her hair was down and she was eating leftover pasta from a container and reading a novel she wasn’t absorbing when the knock came. Not a tentative knock. A confident one. The knock of a man who expected doors to open.
She opened it.
He looked like Andrei.
That was the first thing, the gut-level, involuntary thing that hit her before thought could intervene. The same height, the same build, the same dark hair. Twins. But where Andrei was stone, this man was warmth. His face was open in a way Andrei’s never was, the jaw less set, the eyes less guarded, the mouth shaped for smiling in a way that suggested it smiled often and without being asked. He was holding a bottle of wine and wearing an expression she recognised: the weary, fond, exasperated expression of a man watching someone he loved self-destruct and running out of ways to stop it.
“Ciana Reyes,” he said. Not a question. “I’m Anton.”
“I know who you are.”
“Of course you do. May I come in? I brought wine. It’s good wine. Andrei would have brought better wine but Andrei is currently sitting in a hangar in Nice staring at an empty jet, so the wine selection falls to me.”
She let him in because refusing would have required more energy than she had, and because the note he had slid under her door in Istanbul had cracked something in her that she hadn’t yet been able to seal.
He sat at her small kitchen table. She opened the wine. It was good wine. They looked at each other across the table, the twin of the man she loved and the woman who had walked away from him, and the silence was heavy with things neither of them wanted to say first.
Anton said them anyway. That was, she’d learn, what Anton did.
“He hasn’t flown since you left.”
She set her glass down.
“The jet sits on the tarmac. Has for three weeks. He goes to the hangar every morning, every morning, Ciana, and he walks through the cabin and he stands in the galley and then he leaves. He doesn’t tell anyone why. He doesn’t need to. The man reeks of grief and he doesn’t even know it.”
She said nothing. She held her glass and looked at the wine and felt the image settle into her, Andrei in the empty galley, hands on the counter where hers had been, standing in the space where she had stood, and it hurt. It hurt more than she had expected and she had expected it to hurt a great deal.
“He snapped at Alexei,” Anton continued. His voice was quieter now. “Andrei has never defied Alexei. Not once. Not in thirty-five years. He called him and said: ‘I did what you asked. I found her someone good. Are you satisfied?’”
“And was Alexei satisfied?”
Anton looked at her. The warmth in his face was still there but underneath it was something sharper: the intelligence of a man who saw everything, who had spent his life reading rooms and people and the spaces between what was said and what was meant.
“I’ll tell you what Alexei said. But first I need you to answer something. Why did you leave?”
She almost laughed. “You know why I left.”
“I know what he did. I want to hear why it made you leave.”
She set the glass down. Looked at Anton, at his face, which was Andrei’s face rewritten in warmth, the same features made gentle and open and readable, and told him.
“Because I had never touched a man before him. Not like that. Not any of it. And twelve hours later there was a woman in my seat.”
Anton closed his eyes. Briefly. The expression that crossed his face was pain, not for himself, for his brother, for the magnitude of the mistake his twin had made.
“I need to ask,” she said. Her voice was steady. She was tired of it being steady. “Why did he bring that woman onto the plane?”
“Because he’s an idiot.” Anton said it the way a man says something he has said a hundred times, with deadpan affection, a man who had called his brother an idiot many times and meant it every time. “Because he thought if he made you hate him, it’dbe easier for you to leave. Because he doesn’t know how to love someone without trying to protect them from himself.”
The words sat in the room. She let them.
“He loves me.” Not a question.
“He loves you the way only a man who thinks he’s a monster can love someone, completely, destructively, and from behind every wall he can build. Ciana, my brother bought an airline because the alternative was telling you he was in love with you. That isn’t the behaviour of a man with a healthy relationship to his own emotions.”
“Tell me what Alexei said.”
